February 01, 2003

Advertising through the Referrer Logs

Not sure whether anyone else has spotted this, but there seems to be a subtle new form of techno-advertising doing the rounds at the moment.

My referrer log files contain several entries that seem to be purely "pull-in" links - ie URLs for commercial web pages that are most definitely not linking to my site at all, but which may vagually be of some interest to site administrators. I know all the usual news aggrigator referrer URLs, and this seems to be something totally different. I may be wrong, but it certainly looks to me like some smart bods are now using web spiders to deliberately placing bogus "referrer" requests on web sites - in the hope that they will show up in log analysis and generate click through from site admins inspecting the log reports for a website.

I am not going to name names, as that will only encourage them more!

I guess it's a smart way of targetting site administrators and webmasters, although it seems to go against the whole spirit of the web and referral URLs.

Entry categories: Weblog
Posted by Jorgen Thelin at February 1, 2003 11:00 PM - [PermaLink]
 
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Excerpt: As if referrer log spam wasn't enough, Ben Hammersley points out the latest wheez - comment spamming weblogs!...
Weblog: TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog
Tracked: March 29, 2003 02:19 PM
Comments
That's not why they are doing it. When sites list their referrer logs Google will spider that these sites have an extra link and they will get a higher ranking in Google..... Posted by: Skjold on June 27, 2003 07:55 PM